Tell bartender.live what's in your bar and it'll suggest drinks you can make

Bartender Hero Image
Bartender Hero Image (Image credit: Jacket Industries)

What you need to know

  • Bartender.live will tell you what drinks you can make based on whatever you have at home.

I'm not a big cocktail drinker but if I was, I'd want to know what drinks I can make based on the meager collection of things I have in my pantry and bar. It seems that's something most apps don't offer, but one that does is bartender.live and, by all accounts, it's pretty sweet.

Developer David Gagne came up with bartender.live after struggling to come up with a drink based on his own pantry. And the app was born.

On Thanksgiving of 2017, I was standing in the pantry at my father-in-law's trying to think of a cocktail to make instead of (yet another) G&T. "Surely there's an app that will tell me what I can make with what I have here," I thought.

Turns out, there wasn't. Since then bartender.live has grown and grown and ut now has more than 1,000 recipes for drinks that you've probably never heard of. Which is kind of the point, really.

The process of using bartender.live is pretty simple. You tell the app what you have and it cross-references that with its collection of drinks. If you have everything needed to make one, you're good to go. If not, it's probably time to get yourself down to the store.

There's more here, too.

  • Easily discover drinks you can make with the ingredients you have at home!
  • Search and browse over a thousand cocktail recipes, with more added almost every day.
  • Star your favorite drinks for quick access.
  • Send recipes to friends or post to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
  • Learn the history of how a drink was created.
  • Discover new cocktails based on what you have.

As we stumble our way into Christmas 2020 this strikes me as the kind of app we all need right now. You can bag it from the App Store for $2.99 now. And it recently gained iOS 14 widgets that put drink recipes on your Home screen, too!

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.